Literary Birthday – 13 April – Michel Faber

Happy Birthday, Michel Faber, born 13 April 1960

Nine Quotes

A single day spent doing things which fail to nourish the soul is a day stolen, mutilated, and discarded in the gutter of destiny.

Without you at my side, I feel as though my eyes are just a camera, like a closed-circuit camera without film in it, registering what’s out there, second by second, letting it all vanish instantly to be replaced by more images, none of them properly appreciated.

Participating in Society in not a thing one can do naturally; one has to rehearse for it.

Once all the high-falutin journalism has been written, and all the slogans have been shouted, and the speeches have been made by the Bushes and the Blairs, and the damage has been done, and the cities reduced to rubble, and people’s lives have been completely ruined, after all that’s happened, what will happen is that individuals start communicating.

We’re moving towards such a strange time. A time when all our moral choices will be complicated and compromised by our love of progress.

I think it’s juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren’t real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.

Being apart was wrong. Simply lying side by side did more for a relationship than words. A warm bed, a nest of animal intimacy. Words could be misunderstood, whereas loving companionship bred trust.

Most distracting of all, though, was not the threat of danger but the allure of beauty.

These days, the bigger the company, the less you can figure out what it does.